The Anti-Entrenchment Agenda:
"In the 1990s, many of us were talking about an “emerging Democratic majority.” It isn’t emerging anymore; Democrats already have a national majority. They have won the popular vote for the presidency in six out of the last seven elections, going back to 1992. If not for the Electoral College, the entire history of the past two decades would be different. The Senate is a similar story. In all 15 Senates since 1990, according to calculations by Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, the Democrats have won more votes than the Republicans but controlled the Senate only six times. If majority rule had determined control of both the presidency and the Senate, there would be a liberal majority on the Supreme Court too. Remember how Republicans in the 1960s claimed to represent a “silent majority”? Democrats today are a stymied majority—and not merely in the House of Representatives. What is really stymieing Democrats is the structure of institutional power in America. Three distinct challenges confront them. The first is the entrenched power of concentrated wealth, magnified in recent decades by increasing economic inequality. The second is the aggressive use of political incumbency by Republicans to extend and increase their control through such means as voter suppression. The third consists of the advantages that Republicans derive from the structure of government institutions at a time when Democratic voters have become concentrated in cities and in the most urbanized states. The geography of partisan support is closely related to America’s racial and cultural divisions, and it has skewed not only the Senate but also the House and state legislatures in Republicans’ favor. Each of these three distinct sources of conservative power requires a different set of responses."
